County Lags in Sending Students to 4-Year Schools

Despite strong SAT scores and low dropout rates, Ventura County high school students remain less likely to attend four-year public colleges than their peers statewide, data released Tuesday reveal.

About 56% of graduating high school seniors in Ventura County seek higher education, but most attend community colleges rather than Cal State or University of California schools.

Those are among the findings of the annual High School Performance Report, to be released by the California Department of Education today.

The report is a compilation of data about a variety of educational topics--dropout rates, Scholastic Assessment Test scores, number of students enrolled in vocational classes and percentages attending public colleges.

Given that much of the information about standardized test scores and drop-out rates has been previously released, county educators on Tuesday honed in on the disparity between academic achievement in high school and the relatively low percentage of county kids who go on to four-year state colleges.

In the 1996-97 school year, 7.3% of Ventura County seniors were UC-bound, which matches the statewide numbers, but only 5.7% of local seniors were headed to a Cal State school, compared with 9.4% of students across California.

About 42.7% of local high school seniors signed up for classes at community colleges--compared with 34.8% elsewhere in the state. Figures are not available for students attending private and out-of-state schools.

The best hope of remedying the situation is the proposed Cal State University Channel Islands at the former Camarillo State Hospital, said local educators and politicians.

“That’s a trend we need to reverse,” said state Sen. Jack O’Connell (D-San Luis Obispo). “These statistics only illustrate the need for a CSU campus in Ventura County . . . . We have a crying need for a four-year degree-granting university right here. I’m a good example. I grew up in Ventura County, but to attend a four-year university, I had to leave.”

County schools Supt. Charles Weis agreed, saying that the college-bound percentages were a blemish on an otherwise great report card.

“I’m very concerned about the CSU attendance rates,” he said. “It used to be that we were always three percentage points behind the state; now we’re 3.7% behind the state. I hope proximity is the reason . . . . That’s what we keep telling the CSU trustees: ‘If you build it, they will come,’ because we have a lot of quality kids in this county.”

An official with the state education department predicted the numbers would switch dramatically if the Channel Islands site became a full-fledged campus.

“The CSU and community college statistics reflect the institutions that are local,” said Pat McCabe, an administrator in the office of policy and evaluation. “If you had a CSU school there, community college numbers would go down and CSU numbers would go up. It probably wouldn’t affect the total [college-bound] percentage.”

Even though the college-bound percentages were disappointing on some fronts, they have nudged upward over the last two years.

Schools in the eastern portion of Ventura County--particularly in the largely affluent Oak Park and Conejo Valley unified school districts--continue to send the highest percentage of students to the California university systems.

Schools in Ojai and Ventura have been shepherding more students than usual to college over the last two years, posting jumps in college-bound percentages.

In the small Ojai Unified School District, attendance at UC schools has jumped to 10.2% of seniors. Similarly, attendance at CSU schools and community colleges has grown to 4.7% and 49.2%, respectively.

“We’ve worked really hard on that in the past few years,” Supt. Gwen Gross said. “We’ve improved our counseling and implemented one-on-one parent conferences in freshman, sophomore, junior years so students focus on shooting high.”

Why students opt for community colleges over four-year schools varies, said Jack Loritz, a Thousand Oaks High School guidance counselor.

Lower tuition rates and a desire to stay close to family and work are just a few of the uncountable explanations for the high numbers of community college enrollments, Loritz said. Although more than half of Thousand Oaks High students attend community colleges, that does not mean they are not qualified to attend more prestigious schools.

“More and more kids that are qualified to go to schools all over the country, go to community colleges,” Loritz said. In recent years, state schools have also begun encouraging families to consider sending their college-bound students to community colleges first before transferring to four-year universities, said Richard Simpson, assistant superintendent of instructional services in the Conejo Valley Unified district.

He and Loritz expect enrollment for Ventura County students at California State schools to go up if the Channel Islands campus opens.

“If you look at every state school that has opened up, the immediate community around it sends a large number of kids from that area,” Loritz said.

In other sections of the report, Ventura County students bested their California peers in SAT scores, averaging 1056 out of a possible 1600, as opposed to the state average of 1010.

Similarly, the county posted a 90.2% high school completion, as opposed to the state’s 87%. Ventura County students also squeaked ahead of the state’s 35.4% average of students completing the course requirements for state schools. Across the state, more California students are staying in school, they’re taking more courses with rigorous-sounding names and more of them are passing tough exams that earn them college credit, the statistics showed.

But at least some of the apparent good news in the high school performance reports released annually is an illusion--one that educators freely admit is based largely on record keeping and good intentions rather than on actual improvement. And changes in how the data are reported this year makes it difficult to make comparisons with previous years.

The new reports show that in 1996, the latest year for which data are available, 60% of the state’s high school graduates enrolled in college--up about five percentage points from four years earlier.

About 35% of the graduates had taken the courses required by the state’s two four-year public university systems--which represented a three point increase from previous years.

But the new reports do not take into account the standardized test scores that were released earlier this summer. Those scores showed that California high school students are particularly weak in reading, with the average student reading more poorly than about two-thirds of the students in the nation.

Folmar is a Times staff writer and Hamm is a reporter for Times Community News.